The students from Year 1 to Year 3 are looking at stereotypes this week. They have been asked to describe a witch from a Fairy Tale. What do they look like? What do they wear? What do they do? What do they say? We need to think about how do we know all this information about a witch even when we haven’t read the story.
Whose lives in th house? What do they do? What do they look like? What are they wearing?

Over the past two weeks the students have been learning Super Sentences (Yr 1-2) and Memorable Sentences (Yr 3-6). We have discussed what features make this kind of sentence a memorable. We deconstructed the sentence and used our Super 6 Strategies and found all the parts of speech that make the sentence interesting to the reader. The students revised the sentence to improve the words and make it their own. The last step was to imitate the sentence in a new story by replacing characters, nouns and verbs. We will be practising this task many times over the year with the purpose developing the skills in summarising information, learning not to plagiarise and creating their own Memorable Sentences in their written work.

This term all year levels will be looking at Visual Literacy – the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image, extending the meaning of literacy, which commonly signifies interpretation of a written or printed text. We will be exploring visual texts, conventions, techniques, processes and image choices that help us to understand and create visual texts. Students will be working with advertising, blogs, texts, video clips, newspapers, etc, etc to communicate ideas to an audience.

The Year 1, 2 and 3 students are going to have a go at remembering how to log on to laptops using their Usernames and Passwords. From there they are going to search using one of the search engines the keyword “wildself” so that they build their own Wildself.

Information literacy is an understanding and a set of abilities enabling individuals to recognise when information is needed and have the capacity to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.” An information literate person is able to:

recognise a need for information

determine the extent of information needed

access the needed information efficiently

evaluate the information and its sources

incorporate selected information into their knowledge base

use information effectively to accomplish a purpose

understand economic, legal, social and cultural issues in the use of information

recognise information literacy as a prerequisite for lifelong learning

Aim of the Information Specialist Teacher

Assist students to seek, critically evaluate, synthesise and present information in a variety of ways. Incorporate the essential knowledge and skills of the Australian Curriculum into teaching and learning programs. Help students use a range of resources and technologies, and provide opportunities for students to work in groups, individually or whole class. Collaboratively plan and teach units of work with subject and classroom teachers to develop information literacy. Be inclusive of the diverse needs of learners and instruct students in information tools and services available to them. Provide a friendly learning environment in which students feel confident that their information needs will be addressed. Provide access to local knowledge networks and assist students in the use of the Internet and Intranet. Coordinate displays, special events and activities to support student learning, and ensure that the library resource centre is multi-functional and a focal point for student learning. Advocate the need for students to be information literate and safe digital citizens. Develop students’ love of reading and the power of obtaining knowledge through a 21st Century teaching/learning program.

Context

Information literacy skills and knowledge are essential in a global information environment characterised by constant change and innovation, a variety of formats and media and a vast amount of information of different qualities. There is increasing belief in the importance information literacy skills, both personally and professionally. In Australia, criteria for expressing standards for information literacy have been established by the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL). Within Cooinda Primary School the links to our school plan include:- Generation Z, Visible Learning, Digital Citizenship, Visual Literacy and Connect Community.

We always have some students who present such beautiful artwork in our classroom These are just a few of the warm and cool colour paintings that have been presented. Students were asked to either use warm in the background and cool in the foreground and then pattern sections with an Artline texta to add textured effect. Currently we are working on finishing our artfolios to store all our pieces from class, and from working with Mr F.

Last week the Year 6 students attended the annual Bridgetown Camp School. At the camp they participated in a number of wonderful activities with the key focus of developing team skills, CPS Learning Qualities, self management skills, fun and laughter. Each day was full with tasks that included tabloid sports, orienteering, raft building, canoeing, mountain bike riding, horse riding and team challenges. Students met some interesting characters during their time at the Camp School like Mike and Michael who taught us all how to complete our chores and keep our dorms tidy. During our farm visit we met another Michael who taught us how to make damper, take care of animals, milk a cow, and to be critical thinkers in the world in which we live. We had an amazing time touring his farm and rounding up his horses into the holding paddock to be saddled up. The food at camp was awesome. Students ate a full breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner and supper whilst on camp. All of us came back healthier and happier from the fantastic experience. Please see below our camp Photo Peach Story to show you all the fun times we had in Bridgetown, Big Brook and Luciville Farm.

Each year I try to find a new task to motivate students in learning about ANZAC Day. And each year I try and find another story or book that I can use to help reinforce the importance of always remembering those who fought and died for our freedom. This year is a very special ANZAC day because we are about to commemorate the 100 Year Anniversary of Gallipoli. Therefore, there have been a number of books and new resources available for us as teachers to share with our students.

We are going to not only use these books as informative resources when looking at Time, Continuity and Change, but we are going to use them as part of our Literacy Block. Students are going to compare and contrast the two texts in regards to how it is written and how it is presented. Both books are beautifully written and highlight the emotion of war. I am hoping that students will then be able to write a beautiful Five Senses type poem about ANZAC Day and war. I will be sharing these on the blog when they are done.

Later in the week students are going to research one of our ten Victoria Cross Recipients from Gallipoli and put together a biography of their life in the form of a newspaper article. Although I have done this type of task before, this time I am going to ask the students to work in pairs. We are going to focus on ANZAC Day and our diggers in Weeks 1 and 3.http://versoapp.com/anzacday

It is a very late welcome to 2015 for this years first blog post. We have been flat out in Room 13 getting to know a whole new bunch of Year 6s. We no longer have Year 7s at our school, as they have made the move to secondary school throughout our state. This has posed some changes to the way we do things in Room 13, however we are all set in our routines now.

This year I will be teaching English to all Year 6 students, and my teaching partner in Room 12 will be teaching Mathematics. We thought that this would be a great way to prepare our students for the move to secondary school in Year 7. So far things are going great, and I am loving this change in my teaching. We are also busy using Visible Learning strategies in the school with lots of work on developing Learning Qualities and a common language about learning for our students. Next term the VLT (Visible Learning Team) and myself will be presenting at the Shared School Development Day for our network at the high school. We are excited to be sharing the journey we have taken in Visible Learning for the past three years with other schools in our region.

So far this year in English we have worked hard learning about persuasive text, parts of speech, show me don’t tell me and Mentor Sentences. We have read novels for our Literature Circle groups and have used hooks to engage our audience. The students have used STAR Books as a study guide, reflected about their learning in their ACLs (Assessment Capable Learning Logs) and discovered the terms Super 6 and VOICES. Some of the students attended the Young Writers Conference with author James Roy whilst the whole class participated in the Literature Centre’s incursion. During this incursion we looked at the story ‘The Boy with a Toy’ by Sonya Hartnett, and deconstructed the illustrations to predict the story line. We have almost finished creating our own toy inventions, and when we do I will put some on the blog to share. Our student leaders attended the GRIP Leadership conference where they came away with some other great ideas for our school. Students from Room 13 have created brochures about natural disasters for science and have learnt the 5 themes of Geography for Society & Environment. We have created some beautiful art pieces that include our goals hands, warm and cool colour paintings and crazy hair pictures for our art folios.

Next term Room 12 and 13 will have student teachers for the term. I always look forward to these visits because I learn so much for the younger generation of teachers coming through. We also have our camp in Week 2 which will be exciting. The Year 6s will participate in a number of activities that help to build team work, confidence, leadership and resilience. I always look forward to the superb food that is dished up to us three times a day. The first week back we will be working through a number of tasks linked to ANZAC day to honour the 100 Year Anniversary of Gallipoli. I hope to share some work students do for this topic.